


hold me close (and tell me how you feel)

by miss_belivet



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015), Wonder Woman (2017), Wonder Woman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst and Humor, Bisexual Diana (Wonder Woman), F/F, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Secret Identity, Secret Society of Super Villains - Freeform, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-07 15:46:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15222461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_belivet/pseuds/miss_belivet
Summary: The words stamped across Isabel Maru's jaw shaped her life.Diana of Themyscira didn'thavewords for most of hers.(The WonderPoison soulmate AU.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for joining me in Trope Hell!
> 
> A word before we begin: this AU is set in 2018, but the original plot of Wonder Woman (2017) stays the same, just without Dr. Poison. Steve and Diana leave Themyscira in 1918, fight Ares and a nameless chemical weapon developer, Steve dies, and so on and so forth until the present. Isabel Maru was simply born in 1982.
> 
>  
> 
> [Have a song to set the mood.](https://youtu.be/no-nuFTHetE)

“Of the five goddesses, Aphrodite blessed us with a gift greater than any other.”

Diana hums, her head in her mother’s lap and one hand buried in the thick furs that top her bed. The hour is late, her chambers are warm, and the story is familiar; with every word, her eyelids grow heavier with the exhaustion of a long day spent running from her tutors and her mother’s guard, but she resists the temptation of sleep.

“Soulmates.”

“Soulmates,” Hippolyta confirms, slipping the twine from the end of Diana’s messy braid. “A perfect match for each Amazon: a sister-in-arms able to predict her next move, a lover who can cherish her better than any other, a partner with talents to supplement her own.”

“But how do they know one another?” Diana asks in a sleepy mumble against her mother’s warm thigh.

She winces when her mother catches a tangle, and Hippolyta murmurs an apology.

“Aphrodite is not one to waste time in matters of love. So the first words a pair of soulmates will speak to each other are written on their skin, so they can recognize each other immediately.”

The hand in her hair stills, and then Diana's mother reaches forward, pushing a section of her long, leather skirt aside. Inscribed on the smooth, tanned skin in front of Diana’s eyes are Queen Hippolyta’s Words: _I will, my queen_.

Diana traces the dark angles of each letter with the tip of her index finger. A hot feeling, ugly and unwelcome, burns her, but she swallows it, rolling to look up at her mother from her knees.

"But what about the ones with Words like  _Hello_ or _Nice to meet you_?"

Hippolyta chuckles and bends, rubbing her nose against Diana's. "You are being difficult, child. Aphrodite's plans work themselves out in the end."

Diana smiles, envy pushed aside in favor of the warm love she feels for her mother. “How did you meet your soulmate, Mother?”

“Really? You want the story of my Words tonight?”

Diana feels, rather than sees, her mother take renewed interest in their otherwise routine bedtime ritual; the legs pillowing her head shift, and the hand that pushed aside the skirt tightens on Diana's shoulder.

“Really.”

“Not Antiope and Menalippe? Or Venelia and Artemis?”

Diana freezes. Those stories are popular—two of the most epic tales of Amazons finding love in the midst of violent, pitched battle. She loves them almost as much as she loves the people they belong to, but she hesitates, wondering whether her calm, refined mother could tell Antiope’s story with the same enthusiasm as Menalippe at a bonfire or thrust an imaginary labrys as viciously as Venelia at a banquet table.

Her pause must last longer than she imagines, because her mother starts trembling with silent laughter.

Diana scowls and rolls over again, away from Hippolyta, and buries her face in her furs. The ugly feeling is back, hotter than before, and it scalds its way up her shoulders and her neck until it's burning behind her cheeks. She takes a deep breath, trying to chase the feeling out with cool air, but it's a hopeless attempt.

Behind her, her mother heaves a sigh, and then she is wrapped up in strong, warm arms. "Oh, Diana, sweet girl..."

“I want to hear your story,” she says, thanking the gods that her small, petulant voice is muffled by fur.  She couldn't handle an apology from her strong, refined mother. No, she is Diana, daughter of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, and she will be a great warrior someday. Great warriors do not cry over words or Words—or a lack thereof. “You and Phillipus.”

“Oh, very well.” Soft lips press a kiss to Diana's cheek, and a gentle hand starts combing through the tangles in her hair again. “Long ago, when time was new, and all of history was still a dream…”

Bit by bit, lulled by her mother’s voice and the familiar story, Diana falls asleep.

 

* * *

 

Luis Maru takes one look at his daughter and scowls.

Isabel knows that she is not much for an eleven-year-old girl; she knows her scrawny legs and a foreboding soulmark don’t endear an ounce of her to her father. Still, she also knows that she is that she smarter than he thinks and sturdier than she appears, so she juts out her chin and scowls back at him from her place at the stove.

Last December, she read a psychology textbook from the library down the street. She puts the dull chapter about body language to good use staring him down.

 ~~~~ _Speak to me, I dare you._ She tries to fill her glare with as much loathing as she can, but she can feel her lips twitching when Luis's sullen stare flicks away from her.

A handful of long, tense seconds pass while he shucks his fine, wool coat. Just like she knows she's sturdy and smart, she also knows that her father appreciates a certain sense of decorum. He won't put up much of a fight if it strips away his sense of dignity.

Not that much of it lingers in the slump of his shoulders or the dark bruises beneath his eyes.

Grief hangs over him like a shroud; Isabel's mother and her two siblings had died in an utterly ordinary car accident, long ago enough that Isabel only had fuzzy, strange memories of them. She remembers their home being warm, safe enough that her sister could steal her doll without fearing. The kitchen is cold and tomblike now—her tutor took her to a El Escorial to visit the crypt containing Spain's dead kings, and she marveled at the fact that her house had the same quiet, cold, _thick_ feeling of the air in that mausoleum.

Dead, stagnant air.

 ~~~~Luis brushes past her on his way through the narrow kitchen, and Isabel stirs the peppers and onions she's sautéing while she relishes the familiar thrill of impertinence. She can feel him staring down over her shoulder, sizing up what she’s cooking like a starving buzzard, but she’s used exactly one-fourth of an onion, half a pepper, and a third of a cup of rice to make only enough for herself. A dark hand edges into her line of sight, the faded soulmark on Luis’s wrist glaring at her.

The words are sugary-sweet. Her mother used to tell her friends about their fairytale meeting over tea, but she never told Isabel that story.

 _It would be cruel,_  Liesl Maru used to say to Isabel's sister, _to get her hopes up when she has_ those _Words_.

Luis's hand creeps closer to the stove.

 _I dare you,_ Isabel thinks, gripping her spatula tighter.

Her father grabs a bag of dinner rolls, snorts at her, and he is gone.

_That’s what I thought. Coward._

Isabel dumps the peppers and onions into a bowl with her rice, and it joins a glass of water and a packet of cookies—the stale kind that taste faintly of cinnamon and plastic from the store down the street—on a tray. She picks it up, resting it on a skinny hip; she will eat in her room, because it is easier to sit and read there than it is in the dim, formal dining room.

On the way through the foyer, she catches a glimpse of herself in the long mirror behind the front door. Her hair is in a meticulous bun, the navy pinafore and white shirt her homeschooling tutor makes her wear unwrinkled, and her socks are folded neatly around her calves. She frowns at herself; she thinks she is quite neat enough in her appearance that Luis should have been pleased.

And then she turns her head, examining the German Words on her jaw.

_You do not deserve this._

 

* * *

 

As far back as Diana can remember, she had loved the Words that decorated the other Amazons’ skin.

By the age of seven, she could ramble off a list of most of the marks on the island: the _You will aid our general_ on Phillipus’ collarbone in her mother’s hand, Artemis’ dark thigh and its sharp _I need arrows,_ and the text on Alexa’s third finger, which said _It’s always books with you_ in crooked letters _._ Late at night, after their clandestine training sessions, she liked to sit by the fire and press her face against the jagged scar on Antiope’s shoulder that underlined her mark, a decisive _I am Menalippe_.

She loved their Words so much that she would wake up every morning and scour her skin to see if a set of her own appeared in the night. She kept the habit up for years, sometimes slipping out of bed to light a candle to check in the dark hours of the morning if a particular itch penetrated her skin more deeply than usual. One of her mother's guard always found her when she did that—usually the flicker of lit candle through her window meant a nightmare and a fire hazard for the little Amazon princess—and they always looked at her with sad, pitying eyes as they tucked her back into bed with a kiss and asked her if she needed the queen.

(Except for Orana, who Diana knew had a fading mark that she kept hidden under the bracelet on her left wrist. She would sit with Diana and sing her to sleep, and sometimes she would show her those silvery words: _Anything for you.)_

More than once over the years Diana copied sentences from Mnemosyne’s lectures onto her legs when her history lessons bored her, imagining what kind of soulmate would introduce herself by saying _The uprising would have failed_ _if not for the Amazon battalion led by Penthesilea, daughter of Otrere._

 _A smart one,_ Diana liked to think. At ten, with a small crush on bookish Alexa, she liked the idea of a smart soulmate who could fill her in on all the lessons she missed daydreaming of meeting her in glorious battle.

When Diana is twelve, Hippolyta spots a fake mark on her leg—notes from one of Antiope's lessons on strategy, for the cunning warrior Diana imagines saying her Words that month—and frowns.

“Diana..."

"What?" Diana says it too quickly. She looks down at the paragraph and angles her body toward the wall, feeling her eyes go wide with embarrassment. She sees the coming conversation in the way Venelia's cheeks start turning pink for her by her mother's shoulder. "Mother, I was taking notes. You know how hard it is to bare down on paper when I'm following Antiope around the training grounds. She just talks, talks, talks—"

It isn't a lie.

But Hippolyta's lips still purse at the way she babbles. "Diana, I gave you life in a time of peace—"

"It is so hard to keep up with her sometimes that I am lucky enough to keep my quill inked."

"—and the goddesses blessed you with gifts beyond those of any ordinary Amazon."

"So I write it down on myself sometimes to copy onto paper later."

"You are no human who needs a counterbalance—"

"Antiope doesn't seem to mind."

"—or an Amazon in need of a sister-in-arms.”

Diana's mouth snaps shut. Her treacherous adolescent mind twists her mother's words.

_You are no Amazon._

"Diana."

Hippolyta's voice has gentled.

 ~~~~Diana looks up at her mother through her lashes.

Hippolyta and Venelia are both regarding her with sympathy, but not pity—never _pity_ from the Queen of the Amazons. Diana's eyes sting, and she has to bite her bottom lip to keep it from trembling.

"But I _want_ one."

Guilt wells below Diana's breast when the creases of her mother's frown deepens. That the goddesses saw her worthy of their blessings was a gift, and the hard work her mother once did, praying and hunting animals to sacrifice and sculpting a living baby from clay, was nearly as great.

But she is still not an Amazon like her sisters.

And how can one of them want her like Phillipus loves her mother or Menalippe loves Antiope if she doesn’t have their shared history _or_ their shared Words?

Hippolyta must see her thoughts on her face, because she leans forward and kisses Diana on the forehead. Strong arms wind around her shoulders, and Diana presses her face against the prickly fur at her mother's neck.

"Oh, Diana." A hand pets her braid. "You have so much love to give."

Diana's voice is small as she burrows into her mother's warmth. "...But?"

Hippolyta holds her up, firm and steady.

"But the goddesses have other plans for you, my love. Greater plans than a soulmate could share."

 ~~~~That does nothing to soothe the ache in Diana's heart. A choking feeling builds at the base, and she clutches uselessly at her mother's long robe even as Hippolyta starts to pull away.

"I just- I just _want—"_

Her mother reads her mind, because she kisses the top of Diana's head again.

 _“I_ love you, Diana, and any Amazon who thinks being unmarked makes you lesser than them is a fool.”

 _But I_ _want a_ soulmate _,_ Diana thinks again, desperately. She sinks down onto the floor, fingering the ink on her thigh, and watches the Queen of the Amazonsstride away.

 

* * *

 

Isabel is thirteen years old when she discovers makeup.

She discovers chemistry, too, and she pushes her tutor—a retired teacher who gives lessons to homeschooled students from his living room—into teaching her everything he knows about atoms and ions and chemical reactions. It's not enough, and soon she's in the library every day, steadily working her way through their small science section.

The mark on her jaw may be left up to some trick of coincidence, but the underpinnings of the universe are outlined quite clearly in her books.

  

* * *

 

"You know, humans have soulmates too."

Kasia, another Amazon with faded words written across her collarbone like a necklace, trails her fingertips up Diana's spine.

"Oh?"

Diana's face is buried in Kasia's pillow, but she turns her head to raise an incredulous brow at her lover.

Of  _course_  she knows humans have soulmates. It is always mentioned in some tale or another: Helen of Troy launched one of the Amazons' favorite tales of war by forsaking her husband for her soulmate, and Medea was tricked by Jason, who read her words to her, and murdered their sons as revenge.

"Mhmm. Just like us."

Diana's nose wrinkles, and she turns her back into the pillow to hide it. "Just like you, you mean."

Her words aren't bitter, but a handful of centuries still haven't taken the sting out of Diana's unmarked skin.

But, lonely as she felt sometimes, Amazons like Kasia, the ones with fading Words and soulmates lost to war and slavery long before Themyscira existed, embraced her. They recognized the yearning look in her eyes, the lost midnight wandering, and they sympathized. It was hard watching the others train and work and live in harmony with their soulmates.

But still... the reminder that she is the only Amazon with  _no_  mark, not even a silver one, aches in her chest.

"Actually..." Kasia presses her nose to the curve of Diana's waist, her fingers moving to clasp a bicep. "Just like  _you,_  maybe." 

Her voice goes low and pensive, and Diana has to fight the urge to roll out of the bed and hide herself beneath it. She is a philosopher through and through, Kasia, and she likes to solve unsolvable mental mazes that only several millennia on an isolated island can create.

Diana decides to play along; she can't deny the tug of curiosity. "What do you mean?"

"Half of humanity is born without Words," Kasia says, her breath warm and humid on Diana's skin. "Do you know why?"

"Born without..." That is something Diana has never heard before. Half a population unmarked, just like her.

"Without Words, yes," Kasia's voice has turned breathless, excited, and she sits up, pushing against Diana for leverage. Diana pulls her head out of Kasia's pillow again to watch her, truly intrigued now. "Without Words, Diana, because _their_ soulmate isn't even alive."

The shock of that sends Diana reeling for a moment before she catches on. _"Oh."_

"The Amazons were all born in a single instant. Humans, however..." 

A spark of something bright warms Diana down to her toes. "So they get their Words when the second soulmate is born?"

Kasia nods, grinning her big, toothy smile at Diana, and Diana is struck by how deeply appreciates her lover. To lose a soulmate, and then to be excited about her lover  _gaining_ a soulmate...

But...

No.

The warmth fades, her excited heartbeat slowing until she feels like she's wading through honey, and the familiar sting of being unmarked multiplies as it returns to Diana's breast.

"I am not a human," she says, her voice wooden. She pushes herself up off of Kasia's pallet, sitting with her legs crossed. She picks at a hangnail.

"Maybe not. But you are..." _Not an Amazon like the rest of us,_ Diana knows Kasia wants to say. It's a familiar refrain on the island, one that never hurts less with time. Kasia catches herself, but not before the sentiment penetrates Diana like an arrow sinking into a target. "Oh, Diana, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that. It's just... Everyone else, we were all born with Words, and all at the same time. You were born without words, but you were only _one_  Amazon, and Aphrodite blessed us _all_ with soulmates."

"The gods have greater plans for me," Diana reminds her. She hears Hippolyta behind the words. Even the familiar mental image that accompanies the thought—the Godkiller, gleaming in the armory—does not soothe her.

"But that doesn't mean they forgot about this."

Diana casts a glimpse out the window. The cool breeze is blowing in off the sea, filling the air with the scent of salt water, and the long stretch of the horizon taunts her. How much is out there, beyond the beaches of the island? What is happening in the world of man, where these other unmarked people are? She knows they have literature and art and technology the Amazons do not possess, just as the Amazons have things that humans could never imagine. But what else is happening out there?

Is there a family somewhere that belongs to her soulmate?

"Humans..." The spark returns. "They really do not have words until the other one is born?"

"Just think about it, Di."

 

* * *

 

University sucks.

Isabel realizes this on the very first day of orientation, when she also discovers that she forgot how _stupid_ other people can be.

She could hit herself for it. After two blissful years alone, the final stage of her secondary education left up to the glitchy first generation of online homeschool, she had gotten complacent. She let faceless tutors grade her digital submissions from beaches in Ibiza and Barcelona while she sequestered herself in her three-block neighborhood in Madrid.

 ~~~~And then, on the cusp of eighteen, she dipped into Luis’s bank account and sent herself off to a university Germany.

(Because the chemistry department and the molecular biosciences center at her chosen school were excellent—among the best in the world, with dozens of Nobel laureate alumni. It was  _not_ because her Words were German.)

Granted, she had not expected everyone to be intelligent; she knew there would be rich brats who just needed something to do before inheriting companies and fools who slipped through the cracks in the admissions office and tenured professors who let themselves get sloppier and sloppier with every passing year.

She just hadn't expected so many of them to be absolute idiots. Her fantasy of higher learning didn't even last a day. 

To begin, it rains on the first day of orientation—the kind of late summer downpour that disintegrates cardboard boxes and beats umbrellas into submission and washes away the heavy makeup Isabel cakes on to mask her mark. She walks into the auditorium with her chin tilted toward her soggy collar, her bun heavy with warm rainwater on the back of her head. 

And there, stripping out of their clothes and wringing them out onto the industrial carpet, are at least twenty of her new classmates. She lets herself become so engrossed in watching one girl's slapstick comedy—she's pretty, Isabel thinks, but the girl beside her is prettier—as her big head of curly hair traps her in her tight, sopping sweater that she doesn't notice the boy who sneaks in behind her.

"You don't deserve this?"

Isabel's head whips around. Shaggy, overgrown hair and pockmarked skin hunches down at her.

She grits her teeth. Surely her horror is visible on her face, in the way she can feel herself going red from holding back enraged screams, and the boy won't wait around for an answer.

"What kind of Words are those?" Shaggy snorts in a way that Isabel assumed he thought was relatable, grinning a practiced, lopsided grin at her. She can see it in the way the muscles in his cheek resist the movement, twitching uncomfortably.

Isabel crosses her arms over her chest. Her damp bra squishes, and she nearly does scream when she follows Shaggy's dull eyes to her chest.

When it becomes apparent to her that Shaggy really is waiting for an answer, Isabel levels the same dark look she refined with Luis at him and bares her teeth. She knows about people like him, the ones who read visible soulmarks back at unsuspecting bystanders, trying too hard to find someone who just might like them for it.

"Not yours."

She allows herself just a second to appreciate the way his jaw drops, his bloodshot eyes going wide, before she turns around and walks away. She hears Shaggy call her a bitch, and when she passes the girl in her sweater, she decides to roll with it.

"Head before arms," she hears the girl's friend—possibly her new roommate—order. Under her breath, the pretty, irritated blonde throws up her hands and mutters, "For fuck's sake," at Isabel as she passes.

Isabel raises an eyebrow at her. She doesn't speak. She doesn't stop.

When she sits down in the front row, she decides that undergrad is overrated, people are stupid, and—thinking of the repulsive boy who read her Words and sweater girl's friend—that, no, she cannot ignore the signs that she is a lesbian any longer.

That afternoon, when Isabel returns to her barren dorm room and pulls up her Netflix tab, she is chagrined to see that she has already watched every available episode of The L Word. More than that, she is horrified to realize that she was foolish enough to think watching all nine seasons of _The L Word_ didn't mean anything.

Isabel Maru does not believe in wishing, but she does let herself hope strongly that _You don't deserve this_ is a woman.

For all the good that will do. 

  

* * *

 

More centuries pass, and Diana never lets her little spark of hope fade. Even when the years seem interminable, the days dragging by slowly, she nurtures the idea that her soulmate's mother (or grandmother or great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother) is out, building a home for her soulmate to enter. She imagines what a relief it must be to give birth to a child who already has Words, a guarantee of a future, because she remembers how worried her own mother used to be about her unmarked skin. She crafts a thousand scenarios, always determined to be kind, to give her soulmate a mark that will inspire happiness until they meet, one that promises joy in their future, no matter where their relationship goes.

One day, when she's caught daydreaming too many times, she tells Menalippe, who tells Antiope, but she  _never_ tells Hippolyta.

(She's fairly certain Antiope tells Hippolyta anyway, who, graciously, says nothing. Diana still likes to visit the Godkiller in the armory, and she knows that small obsession combined with her new human fascination must worry her mother terrifically.)

 

* * *

 

Graduation arrives, and Isabel debates skipping the ceremony until her advisor encourages her to go. She throws on her cap and gown over a pair of wrinkled slacks, follows a line of her peers into the auditorium, and scans the audience as she crosses the stage. Afterward, she stands alone at the reception for five minutes, grimacing at the sight of an ex—the one who dumped her on the fifth date after she woke up to the words on Isabel's naked jaw—in the crowd, before leaving.

She goes back to her apartment and throws the cheap, polyester gown in the garbage.

The residual loneliness gnaws at her for the rest of the day until she finally gives into it, wiping away the makeup caked onto her face and standing in front of the dusty mirror in her bathroom. _You do not deserve this_ glares back at her, the letters backwards. Isabel brushes her teeth, flosses, and clips her nails to prolong her time in front of the mirror while she considers her words.

The conclusion she reaches is the same as always: her soulmate is either so high-handed that she places herself above and out of Isabel's reach immediately, or Isabel ends up homeless, gutted, and bleeding out in a ditch while her soulmate still places herself above and out of Isabel's reach immediately.

She hopes that bitch tastes the same bitter tang of hatred on their tongue, wherever they are. Her Words followed her around college like a fucking curse, just like they followed her around Madrid like a damn ghost.

_Don't get too close to the science freak, everyone, even her soulmate can clock her on sight._

When she leaves the bathroom, she finds the cap under her dirty laundry and folds it in half, snapping the delicate mortar board, and buries it deep in her trash can beside the gown.

In the fall, she goes back to school in Berlin, this time for a PhD.

If anything, the people are stupider.

 

* * *

 

Diana trains until she can defeat even Antiope, but it does nothing to prepare her for the aftermath of battle. 

Menalippe follows Phillipus and Artemis as they carry Antiope off the beach; her face is stony, because she does not have the gift of time to grieve while the man Diana plucked from the sea waits to be questioned. As the other Amazons pile German bodies and examine their weapons, Diana and Kasia cut Orana free. Her limp body falls into Diana's arms, swaying a bit with the motion, and Kasia sighs.

"She fought well today," Kasia says, and Diana starts to cry. Then, gentler, "She is in Elysium with Agathe."

Afterward, the day passes in a bizarre blur of motion. The lasso is brought out of the armory, the man questioned, and then—

War.

Ares.

Diana's head spins.

Antiope is dead. She leaves Themyscira. The world is on fire, and people are dying. Ares is back, and he must die. Veld. Ludendorff. Steve. Ares.

(And her soulmate's mother or grandmother or great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother lived through it all, she prays.)

The years pass with alarming speed as Diana throws herself into learning everything she can about the world of man. She admires their art and their machinery, but even the finest sculpture or the fastest car cannot soothe the horror of watching atrocities pile on top of one another in an endless stream of senseless violence. She buries herself in work, but never quite puts her head in the sand; every few years, when she cannot take it any longer, she dons her mother's armor and fights for Steve and Etta and her soulmate's great-some-grandmother.

It happens on a Wednesday in 1982. She is restoring a small African statue in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C.

She rolls up her sleeves before getting to work, the small silver cuffs she wears in place of her gauntlets pushing at her wrists, and her new assistant's eyebrows shoot toward her hairline.

"Damn, Diana, what did you do?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really shouldn't be starting another fic, but I just had to, okay? I just had to.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, a little timeline update: Pretend _Batman vs. Superman_ and _Justice League_ never happened. Lex Luthor, Jr. still targeted Superman circa 2015, got arrested, and L-Corp company was handed down to Lena Luthor, sparking the events of _Supergirl._ In 2016, Bruce Wayne still used Luthor's metahuman research to assemble the starter pack Justice League. It takes Diana a lot of patience and several hours with the lasso, but Batman and Superman are on speaking terms and are _not_ locked in a battle to the death.
> 
> I'm still outlining, so this might not all be relevant, but it will give you a reference point since I'm mixing DCEU and DCTV with a few small details from the already ridiculous comic canon in this one fic.

A sudden, shark  _crrrack!_ captures Diana’s attention.

She turns her head as quickly as she can to assess the situation without alarming anyone, but her vigilance is unnecessary.

Because the quiet, dinstinct  _fzzz_  of a carbonated drink follows.

Not a gunshot, then.

Still, the suddenness of it is utterly at odds with the environment—the clink of fine crystal and Wedgwood appetizer plates, the low murmur of self-assured voices, and yes, there it is: a condensation-slick can of Dr. Pepper clutched in the hand of Maxwell Lord.

 

“There she is! The woman of the hour!”

Diana zeroes in on Lord’s tidily gelled hair and follows his line of sight to a woman in the process of turning her back to him. It's a momentary curiosity—this is a gala to celebrate the American Friends of the Louvre, not any one woman's accomplishment—until Diana sees who captured Lord's interest. She is clearly being called loudly enough for her to hear, because the man beside her turns to peer between back at Lord with disapproval in the tight purse of his lips, but the woman does not falter. Instead, she starts weaving her way through the crowd, away from Lord.

It couldn’t be a clearer message, in Diana’s opinion.

“Doctor!”

Of course, a boy like Lord wouldn’t let his playthings escape so easily.

Diana heaves a sigh, rolling her eyes at the frolicking muses and cherubs decorating the vaulted ceiling.  _Of course not,_ she thinks, turning an apologetic smile to Lois as she excuses herself from the small talk they have both only been half-listening to.

Men like Lord never know when to take no for an answer, and Diana always finds herself stepping in to make sure they learn that lesson.

It's hard not to, when she's usually the tallest and most intimidating woman in the room. It's doubly hard when she's read Lord's heavily redacted criminal record off of one of Bruce's monitors and knows how slippery his hands can be when they aren't creating synthetic Kryptonite or shooting DEO agents.

She sets herself on a course to intercept the retreating doctor, handing off her half-empty glass to a passing server. A few familiar faces perk up at the sight of her—only a few, and mostly other European representatives of the Louvre, since she goes to great pains to make sure museum curator Diana Prince is not hugely recognizable—and she lifts a hand to them in the universal gesture that says,  _Give me just one moment._

And then Diana can see that Dr. Maru's face is set in the hard, flinty look of a warrior about to do battle. She looks well accustomed to slipping through clusters of women in couture and rich men with wandering hands, her back straight and regal.

Beneath Diana's growing irritation with Maxwell Lord, a flicker of amusement sparks.

She's so small that it could be quite amusing to stand back and watch her fend off Lord herself. Her eyes flicker over to a Greek short sword displayed on a pedestal a few feet to her left, and, if Diana weren't so concerned with the woman's safety, she just might guffaw.

But then Lord calls out "Dr. Maru!" in his smarmy, oily voice and makes a face at another man nearby, and—yes, there it is, the dirty, requisite leer of male solidarity at Dr. Maru's backside.

Diana's resolve strengthens.

She's ten feet away.

Then five feet.

Three.

Diana crosses the remaining distance in two steps—the same long, confident stride she learned by imitating her mother in her little one-woman skits so many centuries ago—and falls into step beside Dr. Maru, who is cursing under her breath in breathtakingly filthy German.

When she looks up at Diana, she actually seems fairly panicked beneath the aggravation dominating her expression.

But she does not apologize; she does not even blush. No, she turns over her shoulder, glares at Lord and his friend, and hisses, _"Flachwichser!"_

So Diana tosses an unapologetic glance over her own shoulder at Maxwell Lord.

Then, angling a grin down at Dr. Maru that is almost definitely cheekier than it is reassuring—it's the same grin Etta spent most of her life scolding Diana for—Diana places a deliberate hand on the warm spot where the smaller woman's dress ends and her bare arm begins.

And it is...

 _Indescribable,_ Diana thinks.

Transcendent. Unmatched. _Perfect._

She might even guess  _divine_  if she hadn't encountered the old gods one too many times to have any lasting comfort with the word. 

It is electric, maybe.

Yes, touching this woman is  _electric._ The feeling jittering up her arm is like the lasso slipped loose from its strap at her waist, coiled itself around her arm, and plugged itself into a power outlet; her skin nearly vibrates against Dr. Maru's warm arm, hot jolts of pure energy crackling up from Diana's fingertips and tensing the muscles all the way through her shoulder and down her back.

Just to be certain, Diana takes a second to whip her head around and check.

No, it isn't the lasso.

She notices, almost vaguely from the corner of her eye, that Dr. Maru's lips have parted, her curses silenced, and she's breathing shallowly.

She's pale, too.

Very pale.

Diana shifts her hand from Dr. Maru's arm to her waist, guiding more of slight weight onto her forearm, and leads her through one of the doors at the end of the long banquet hall. _Hera, help me,_ she thinks, leaning the poor, unsteady woman up against the wall so she can peer back through the doorway at Maxwell Lord.

He's staring back at her, his dark eyes intense and unsatisfied, and Diana realizes what must be happening. Hot anger wells beneath her breast.

 _What has he done to you?_ she thinks, glancing back at Dr. Maru, whose head is in her hands. Beneath her breath, she's whispering to herself, _"Gott, Gott, Gott, mein Gott."_

With one hand in her pocket and the other on Dr. Maru's shoulders, Diana bends down to her eye level and says in German, as sincerely as she can, "You do not deserve this."

Dr. Maru's mouth closes so quickly that Diana hears her jaw crack.

And then she speaks to the floor at her feet, almost silently, _"Scheiss."_

"I will take care of this," Diana promises. She reaches a hand up to cup Dr. Maru's face, but a bony, skinny hand bats it away before she can make contact. Her skin zings with the sensation, and then Dr. Maru is moving, slipping under her arm and around to her back. She doesn't stop, tearing down the long corridor toward the coatcheck in a flurry of dark green cloth, and all Diana can do is stand where she has been left, stunned.

Dr. Maru slaps a slip down on the small desk and snaps at the valet about calling a taxi until a bundle of cloth is pushed across the counter at her.

But before she leaves, she stops at the door, points at Diana, and says the single Word that dominates the underside of Diana's left wrist in two bold letters with such sureness that Diana is left with no doubt about who she is and what she means.

_"No."_

~~****~~And she is gone.

  

* * *

 

Of course Dr. Isabel Maru recognizes Diana Prince.

Of course she knows who Diana Prince really is.

And of-fucking-course the goddamned _Wonder Woman_ says her Words.

 _It's par for the course,_ Isabel thinks; nothing in her shitty, shitty life would be what it is if everything went according to plan.

No, her life hadn't followed the rigid path she outlined when she was seventeen.

Not even close.

The first deviation came at the tender age of twenty-two, and Isabel will readily admit that this error—the first in a series of bad decisions and their resulting karmic retribution—was entirely her fault: she chose to work on a doctorate in molecular toxicology instead of entering a basic biochemistry PhD program. Then, out of a cohort of 30 students, Isabel's high standards meant that she only enjoyed the company of two women: Johanna, the curiously naive and wickedly smart woman who didn't give a single thought to Isabel's Words and asked her on a date instead, and the shrewd and calculating Paula, who encouraged all of Isabel's worst ideas.

Four years after that, Isabel's girlfriend was dead and her dissertation—a 200-page piece about stabilizing aerosol neurotoxins that her advisors called  _less-than-kosher_ several times over, but won Paula's wholehearted approval—garnered more attention than she expected. In the summer of 2009, at twenty-six, Isabel Maru was surprised to possess competitive offers to join research teams, well, _everywhere_.

So she sold her patent for a tidy sum and started wading through the flood of proposals in her email inbox.

She was supposed to join the tenure-track at a prestigious university. Instead, the prospect of a black-market pharmaceutical startup in Japan carrying a seven figure salary tempted her. They didn't seem like they were trying to manufacture any medicines, per se, but that wasn't the kind of thing that concerned Isabel much anymore.

No, they offered her resources, free rein over her research, and an escape from yet another dead woman's ghost, and  _that_  is what mattered to her.

 _(Priorities,_ she thinks ten years later, sitting in the back of a taxicab with her head between her knees. _I need to realign my priorities.)_

But before Isabel could accept and start packing up her apartment, a tall, dark-skinned American man tracked her down in her favorite café in Berlin.

He flashed a badge at her and said, "I am Special Agent Hank Henshaw with the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation."

Ignoring, momentarily, the terror that one sentence jolted deep in her gut, Isabel merely tilted her head and said, with confidence she did not actually possess. "You know who I am."

 ~~~~Agent Henshaw told her that he wanted her to examine extraterrestrial paralytic agents, and Isabel's guard dropped.

"Oh, Jesus _Christ,"_  she remembers saying to her mug of Turkish coffee between fits of laughter. Then, looking at the deaf old lady at the table next to them, _"Aliens."_

Back then, she liked to consider herself a serious woman, with very serious prospects, and she drew a line at becoming E.T. villain.

But Henshaw's stern expression never cracked. They stared each other down for a few seconds. Henshaw looked very much like he would like to reevaluate his career.

The silence lasted just a second too long for her entertainment.

"No _fucking_ way."

And then, the revelation that turned her world on its foundations: "No. I am not being facetious, Dr. Maru. Your work has caught the eye of our specialists..."

He went on for a few minutes, talking about well-equipped labs and opportunities to expand Earth's limits, or something else poetic that didn't actually belong in a laboratory—or at least, Isabel didn't previously think it did. Isabel tuned him out when he starts talking about relocating to the United States, instead thinking, fairly hysterically, of the dozens of lab monkeys she killed in the four years it took to complete her PhD. Then she caught Henshaw's starting salary—surprisingly high for a government job offered to a recent graduate—and thought to herself, _You do not deserve this._

Isabel couldn't help it; she started snickering. What was someone supposed to do when extraterrestrial life—extraterrestrial life that was intelligent enough to create artificial neurotoxins, at that—was confirmed by a government official?

Agent Henshaw left his card on top of her notebook and prompted her to _think about it_.

As she sipped her coffee, Isabel concluded that if she was on the FBI's radar, she was on other clandestine agencies' watchlists. It was a heady feeling, for a woman who spent most of her youth being rendered invisible.

She was more than a little terrified, but really, she almost wanted to release a canister of VX gas in a shopping mall just to see who secreted her out of prison first: Russia or America.

Because she could do that.

She literally wrote the book on it.

(If only Luis could see her now.)

 _(Aliens._ The Americans wanted her to research _aliens.)_

 _(Wonder Woman said my words._ Wonder Woman _is my soulmate.)_

Anyway, Isabel could take a hint, and a special agent showing up on her figurative doorstep was a fairly large one. She went home and burned the envelope from Big Pharma's nefarious underground. In the fall, she joined the faculty at her alma mater, where she spent a year teaching and researching while she considered her more legitimate options.

And if she murdered a lab full of particularly annoying competitors, made it look like a simple accident in case the Agent Henshaws of the world started sniffing around, and attracted the attention of Alexander Luthor? 

 ~~~~Well, that was just coincidence.

She expected to be poached from the University of Göttingen, sure. She just expected it to be the work of a private R&D firm, not a secret society of self-proclaimed supervillains led by a man who was supposed to be dead.

_Supervillains._

But aliens were real, she had just murdered six people, the pay was good, and Luthor let her do anything—literally _anything_ —that she wanted with her poisons.

She really liked to think it was working out for her, too.

Not anymore, though.

In the pocket of her coat, her phone starts chiming. It's an ominous ringtone, one she set as a warning to herself for whenever her best-friend-turned-black-widow called, and it does nothing to steady her rapid pulse or mask the sour taste of bile in her throat.

 _"Where are you?"_ Paula von Gunther demands, her voice shrill and staticky, when Isabel presses the button to answer the phone with a shaky finger. _"Diana Prince has disappeared, and Maxwell Lord is bitching about you to everyone who comes near him!"_

 _Diana Prince, my soulmate,_ Isabel thinks sarcastically. That shitty secret identity that did nothing to conceal the Amazon warrior who shared her name.

_"Isabel! Where. Are. You?"_

Isabel wracks her brain for a destination to give Paula, but she can't think of one. Instead, she mutters something stupid.

She says, _"You do not deserve this_ is _fucking Wonder Woman,_ Paula."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please ignore my pseudoscience! I've been pretending all this time to understand chemistry, but I really, really don't. It's my understanding that VX _can_ be released as a vapor, but there is trouble getting it to maintain a gaseous state for long. So imagine VX, because of course Isabel-fucking-Maru picks a highly restricted WMD to study for her PhD.
> 
> Anyway, how was _that_ for a first meeting? Karma really has it in for Dr. Poison, doesn't it?


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for the amazing feedback and the follows! I had to take a little break to get my senior thesis on track for the fall semester, but I definitely plan to keep updates on this story semi-consistent until it's over.

Diana isn't surprised when Clark is the first to find her. She's staring at the long row of windows, waiting—although for what, she isn't quite certain. Dr. Maru's taxi disappeared around the corner nearly fifteen minutes ago and shows no sign of returning. She's half-tempted to follow it still, to whip off her dress in favor of the armor beneath and run after the cab on her bare feet, to wrap Dr. Maru up in the lasso and ask what _"No!"_  is supposed to mean.

But that would be inappropriate. Even the thought of violating a panicked woman like that— _her soulmate_ —makes her queasy. She stands still and weighs her other options instead.

There aren't many. She can go back to the gala to make Maxwell Lord tell her who her soulmate is and what he wants with her. She could loiter around the Batcave until Alfred gets fed up and gives her access to Bruce's equipment. She can conduct some intense Googling and stalk social media until she finds Dr. Maru.

All in all, every option is fairly ridiculous. For a moment, she considers letting Dr. Maru's  _NO_  dictate her path.

But she's not about to give up three millennia of hoping for a soulmate to a single word from a very distressed person. She spent three decades planning for rejection; Diana knows she deserves an explanation. She deserves a chance to explain herself. And, if she wants it, her soulmate deserves a chance to chew her out for marking her with Words as terrible as _You do not deserve this_ when she's not shaking like a leaf.

 _(Deserve_ is quickly becoming Diana's least favorite word, but it's been trapped on a loop in the front of her mind since the night her mother kissed her goodbye and whispered, _"The world of man does not deserve you, Diana,"_ into her ear.)

Nevertheless, Clark eventually lopes through the doorway looking for her. She watches him direct a wide-eyed look at her and slump back against the wall from the corner of her eye. Then he clears his throat, and Diana releases the breath she's been holding.

Then her chest fills with the heavy, leaden weight of defeat, and she slumps against the wall beside Clark.

"You heard?"

Clark's shoulders rise up toward his ears, and Diana finally tears her gaze away from the windows. "I didn't mean to eavesdrop."

"No, you were right to listen. If it were anything else..."

"Something like a rich megalomaniac with state-of-the art tech at his disposal throwing a temper tantrum in a crowded public venue?" Clark asks, his cheeks dimpling with the wry smile on his lips.

Diana huffs and meets his eyes. He knows exactly what she thought was happening, and from his chagrined expression and the way he's rubbing at the House of El's crest beneath his crisp white dress shirt, she knows he thought the same. 

"It does happen too often to remain complacent around you and Bruce at parties," she concedes, crossing her arms over her chest.

She watches Clark fiddle with his cufflinks. He directs a pointed glance down at the sterling silver cuffs on her own wrists. "I'm not the only one who makes trouble at these things."

Maybe it's instinct, or maybe she's trying to protect the memory, but Diana grasps the bracelet over her Word. Her fingertips should sizzle against the cool metal, she thinks—they haven't yet stopping burning with the sensation of simply touching Dr. Maru. Still, she frowns at Clark; her soulmate isn't  _trouble,_ not like Max Lord or Lex Luthor.

(But even she knows that the situation will devolve into something resembling trouble very quickly when Bruce finds out.)

The silence lasts. Clark is pink, having caught onto Diana's silent rebuke; Diana is burning, simmering beneath her skin, and she turns her attention back to the window like Dr. Maru might still change her mind.

When Clark stops blushing, he clears his throat and says, "...You know, I told Lois she was probably going to die from internal hemorrhage after shouting 'It's alright' at her four times in a row."

 _Oh,_ Diana thinks, followed by a resigned, _Great Hera_. Apparently, the supers were not blessed with tact or gentle soul-meetings.

"What did she do?"

"Screamed, mostly." He bites his lip and raises his hands to his eyes, index fingers pointing out to mimic his heat vision. He parts his lips, pushing a sizzling hiss of air out from between his teeth. "When I cauterized it. Her sister actually punched me the first time we met, though... And my ma, she cried when she found out."

The back of Diana's tongue goes sour with bile. "Humans can be cruel to children with frightening Words."

"I mean—bad Words, they aren't the end of the world... Kids teased her in school, sure, and her dad was..." Clark twists his shoulders and rubs at the back of his neck; she can see he's trying to hide his pity view.

"Abusive." Diana can hear herself, the flatness in her tone, and inwardly she winces with Clark. But what might someone with a child born with Words as foreboding  _You do not deserve this_ do? If her own mother was stern enough about her lack of words, and Lois's father cruel enough to scar his daughters well into adulthood, what happened to Dr. Maru growing up?

Enough to put that terrified look in her eye, clearly. 

But Clark doesn't give her much time to worry; his own eyes go wide with panic, like he's revealed something she shouldn't know about Lois. Nudging him with her hip, she decides that dealing with his anxiety is easier than addressing her own. "The op-ed she wrote for the Huffington Post, remember?"

His shoulders slump again, and he sighs hard enough to rustle the leaves of the potted palm at the opposite end of the hallway. "Oh. That one."

"Yes." Diana regrets bringing it up when he grimaces; the agony in that simple pull of the muscles around his eyes, no doubt as he remembers something from that terrible article, tugs at her heart.

Clark knows the stories as well as she does, if not better: bad Words make popular clickbait headlines with news outlets—statistics on addiction and suicide attempts, stories about beaten children and damning religions, horrifically unethical experiments. Lois Lane is one of the few to own hers publicly.

 _They do not deserve you,_  Diana thinks, much to her own chagrin, rubbing her thumb absently over her cuff where it conceals the raised  _NO_  on her wrist from view. Her casual bracelets never do much to hide her mark, as large and dark as it is against the pale underside of her arm, but it's still a fortunate placement; in Wonder Woman's armor, under her traditional leather gloves and bracers, it's completely hidden.

Still, that doesn't stop Clark from catching the small motion and pointing. "I don't think she meant it."

"I think," Diana starts, but she doesn't get to finish the thought before a piercing shriek from the room behind them calls the League into action.

 

* * *

 

"Alright, I gave you a week." Paula's expensive shoes click up the stairs into Isabel's lofted study in Madrid, where her prey lies on the shiny oak floor, straightbacked and stiff and surrounded by open books and dark-screened tablets. "Do you still think Wonder Woman is your soulmate?"

Isabel opens one eye to glare at her. "Who let you in? I gave Luz specific instructions to hit you with the door if you turned up."

But she didn't, not really. Paula simply had the gall to laugh at her panic attack in the taxi a week ago, and that pushed up a rage so hot in Isabel's chest until she started imagining what her oldest friend's perfectly coiffed hair would do when her body hit the floor. The mental images were vivid and extremely satisfying, so she mentioned the idea to her housekeeper that Paula, if she dared to show her face, should not be welcome under any circumstances.

Luz had laughed, patted her cheek, and said, "And turn away her sweet girl? Sorry, _Doctora."_

Nonetheless, a familiar swell of fondness follows Isabel's hot indignation when Paula bends down and straightens a lock of her hair, so she resigns herself to another day of not killing her oldest friend.

And then Paula straightens up, glares back, and drops her heavy leather bag onto Isabel's desk with a solid _fwap!_

"You left me. In _New Jersey."_ Paula taps her pointy toe on the floor beside Isabel's face. "You don't get to be the self-righteous one. I do."

Isabel glares harder. "I told you I was leaving. You weren't on the plane when we took off."

"She's _Wonder Woman,_ Isabel. If she wanted to, she would have caught you whether you waited twenty minutes for me or not."

"I know who she is, you fool. I was there."

"I'm the fool? _Me?"_

"Yes, _you,"_ Isabel snaps, closing her eyes again. She listens as Paula lowers herself into a plush armchair to her left with the quiet sound of air leaving the cushions and counts to ten.

"Not a fool, then, but I do think you may have lost your mind," Paula says. "You know you can't tell Luthor about this. You can't tell anyone. They'll slaughter you as soon as they think you're in her pocket."

Isabel lifts a hand to massage her aching head. "I shouldn't have told _you."_

"You wound me." A snort, as elegant as everything Paula does, belies her amusement, but her words are still tinged with worry. "So Wonder Woman said your Words. That doesn't have to mean anything."

Somewhere in the room, Isabel's cat hisses, giving the two women only a second's warning before a heavy volume hits the floor. It lands with a _thud_ loud enough to shake the air—and it's probably scuffed the floor's fine finish at the very least—but Isabel can't find it in her to care; it's a terribly accurate representation of the way she feels.

Tension, taut and nervewracking, has turned the muscles in her shoulders so sore that she can barely feel that woman's touch burning her anymore.

(It's carpal tunnel, she's been telling herself. It's just an extreme form of carpal tunnel that extends all the way to her shoulder. Or a slow-acting neurotoxin someone managed to slip her. Not a soulmate. Not Wonder Woman.)

Isabel ignores the cat, pushing her elbows against the floor and sitting up. Paula looms over her in the closest chair, watching her. In a remarkable display of emotion, her Botoxed brow is furrowed.

_That doesn't have to mean anything._

Isabel fights the temptation to snatch the spiky heel off Paula's foot and stab her with it.

Instead she says, through gritted teeth, "I spoke back."

 _"Isabel_." 

When Paula manages to replace the stupefied horror off her face for something more calculating, she pulls her bag off the desk and rifles around inside it until she finds her own iPad, tapping for a few seconds before holding up Luthors' metahuman files. Diana Prince winks up at Isabel through an ATM camera on a loop, and Isabel has to quash the urge to gnash her teeth. It certainly doesn't help that the damn woman is offensively attractive, with shining curls and toned biceps practically glaring through the screen at Isabel. The ancient lizard part of her brain high on finding her soulmate is so doped up in oxytocin and dopamine that even the looping footage makes Isabel's heart sputter and her temperature rise.

"Christ, put that away."

"I can't say I'm not disappointed in you. I didn't even think people like her had Words," Paula says with such delicate disdain that Isabel is quite surprised she doesn't pull a travel-sized bottle of hand sanitizer out of her bag to wash the taste of the words out of her mouth.

"According to the research I did on the plane—"

"Always research with you scientists."

"—we graduated from the same PhD program. The answer is yes, they do."

And then Paula reclines in her chair, as far away as she can be without standing up, and eyes her with a look that suggests she's afraid of contagion. Isabel knows she'll be seeing that pinched expression on Paula's face more often; her friend might like the high-risk gossip of espionage, but she's more cautious brushing her hair than Isabel ever thinks to be.

Nevertheless, when Isabel offers nothing else, she stands up and mutters something sharp about poor hostesses and yoga pants that Isabel pretends she doesn't hear. Before she leaves to change, she peers down at Isabel. "Are you coming to Vienna next week?"

"Don't worry your pretty head. I won't bring the wrath of the gods—" Isabel tries to sound nonchalant, but the word is dry and uncomfortable in her throat, "down on you."

Paula sneers and leaves.

Rationally, Isabel knows Paula is bitter. Diana caught a glimpse of her face last year and forced her hand toward an impromptu summer makeover—an unfortunately pointy rhinoplasty and an unattractively mousy bob. But her amygdala is experiencing an evolutionary malfunction; the awe that accompanies her horrified memory of Wonder Woman saying her Words insists that her soulmate isn't as objectionable as Paula seems to think. 

And then Paula's back, stomping up the stairs in sneakers just as expensive as her heels, and her shirt is cut low enough to expose the dark _Mama_ over her heart.

It's a pointed warning. Still, Isabel's head throbs with residual stress, so she takes the opportunity Paula's offering and rolls with it. "Where is my goddaughter, anyway? I said I would teach her how to make a gummy bear explode for her birthday..."

Paula sighs.

 

* * *

 

Two weeks, three suspiciously cruel deaths for ranking US officials, and countless Google searches later, the Justice League has a case to work, and Diana has a name.

_Isabel Maru._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's Diana's #1 weakness? Being told no when she really wants to do something!  
> What's her #1 conflict? Respecting the boundaries that her soulmate sets vs. the desire to track Isabel down and get real answers!
> 
> Also, I just love writing Clark Kent. I just can't help but imagine nerdy Christopher Reeve acting like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIaF0QKtY0c) when I write him.


End file.
